The Village Uncle

AN IMAGINARY RETROSPECT

COME!
another
log upon the hearth. True, our
little parlor is comfortable, especially here,
where the old man sits in his old arm chair; but
on Thanksgiving night, the blaze should dance
higher up the chimney, and send a shower of sparks
into the outer darkness. Toss on an armful of
those dry oak chips, the last relicts of the
Mermaid's knee timbers, the bones of your
namesake, Susan. Higher yet, and clearer be the
blaze, till our cottage windows glow the ruddiest
in the village, and the light of our household
mirth flash far across the bay to Nahant. And
now, come, Susan, come, my children, draw your
chairs round me, all of you. There is a dimness
over your figures! You sit quivering indistinctly
with each motion of the blaze, which eddies about
you like a flood, so that you all have the look of
visions, or people that dwell only in the
firelight, and will vanish from existence, as
completely as your own shadows, when the flame
shall sink among the embers. Hark! let me listen
for the swell of the surf; it should be audible a
mile inland, on a night like this. Yes; there I
catch the sound, but only an uncertain murmur, as
if a good way down over the beach; though, by the
almanac, it is high tide at eight o'clock, and the
billows must now be dashing within thirty yards of
our door. Ah! the old man's ears are failing
him; and so is his eye-sight, and perhaps his
mind; else you would not all be so shadowy, in the
blaze of his Thanksgiving fire.

How strangely
the past is peeping over the
shoulders of the present! To judge by my
recollections, it is but a few moments since I sat
in another room; yonder model of a vessel was not
there, nor the old chest of drawers, nor Susan's
profile and mine, in that gilt frame; nothing, in
short, except this same fire, which glimmered on
books, papers, and a picture, and half discovered
my solitary figure in a looking-glass. But it was
paler than my rugged old self, and younger, too,
by almost half a century. Speak to me, Susan;
speak, my beloved ones, for the scene is
glimmering on my sight again, and as it brightens
you fade away. Oh! I should be loth to lose my
treasure of past happiness, and become once more
what I was then; a hermit in the depths of my own
mind; sometimes yawning over drowsy volumes, and
anon a scribbler of wearier trash than what I
read; a man who had wandered out of the real world
and got into its shadow, where his troubles, joys
and vicissitudes were of such slight stuff, that
he hardly knew whether he lived, or only dreamed
of living. Thank heaven, I am an old man now, and
have done with all such vanities.

Still this
dimness of mine eyes! Come nearer,
Susan, and stand before the fullest blaze of the
hearth. Now I behold you illuminated from head to
foot, in your clean cap and decent gown, with the
dear lock of gray hair across your forehead, and a
quiet smile about your mouth, while the eyes alone
are concealed, by the red gleam of the fire upon
your spectacles. There, you made me tremble
again! When the flame quivered, my sweet Susan,
you quivered with it, and grew indistinct, as if
melting into the warm light, that my last glimpse
of you might be as visionary as the first was,
full many a year since. Do you remember it? You
stood on the little bridge, over the brook that
runs across King's Beach into the sea. It was
twilight; the waves rolling in, the wind sweeping
by, the crimson clouds fading in the west, and the
silver moon brightening above the hill; and on the
bridge were you, fluttering in the breeze like a
sea bird that might skim away at your pleasure.
You seemed a daughter of the viewless wind, a
creature of the ocean foam and the crimson light,
whose merry life was spent in dancing on the
crests of the billows, that threw up their spray
to support your footsteps. As I drew nearer, I
fancied you akin to the race of mermaids, and
thought how pleasant it would be to dwell with you
among the quiet coves, in the shadow of the
cliffs, and to roam along secluded beaches of the
purest sand, and when our northern shores grew
bleak, to haunt the islands, green and lonely, far
amid summer seas. And yet it gladdened me, after
all this nonsense, to find you nothing but a
pretty young girl, sadly perplexed with the rude
behaviour of the wind about your petticoats.

Thus I
did with Susan as with most other things in
my earlier days, dipping her image into my mind
and coloring it of a thousand fantastic hues,
before I could see her as she really was. Now,
Susan, for a sober picture of our village! It was
a small collection of dwellings that seemed to
have been cast up by the sea, with the rock weed
and marine plants that it vomits after a storm, or
to have come ashore among the pipe staves and
other lumber, which had been washed from the deck
of an eastern schooner. There was just space for
the narrow and sandy street between the beach in
front, and a precipitous hill that lifted its
rocky forehead in the rear, among a waste of
juniper bushes and the wild growth of a broken
pasture. The village was picturesque, in the
variety of its edifices, though all were rude.
Here stood a little old hovel, built, perhaps, of
drift wood, there a row of boat houses, and beyond
them a two story dwelling, of dark and
weather-beaten aspect, the whole intermixed with
one or two snug cottages, painted white, a
sufficiency of pig styes, and a shoemaker's shop.
Two grocery stores stood opposite each other, in
the centre of the village. These were the places
of resort, at their idle hours, of a hardy throng
of fishermen, in red baize shirts, oil cloth
trowsers, and boots of brown leather covering
the whole leg; true seven league boots, but fitter
to wade the ocean than walk the earth. The
wearers seemed amphibious, as if they did but
creep out of salt water to sun themselves; nor
would it have been wonderful to see their lower
limbs covered with clusters of little shell fish,
such as cling to rocks and old ship timber over
which the tide ebbs and flows. When their fleet
of boats was weather bound, the butchers raised
their price, and the spit was busier than the
frying pan; for this was a place of fish, and
known as such, to all the country round about; the
very air was fishy, being perfumed with dead
sculpins, hard heads and dog-fish, strewn
plentifully on the beach. You see, children, the
village is but little changed, since your mother
and I were young.

How like
a dream it was, when I bent over a pool
of water, one pleasant morning, and saw that the
ocean had dashed its spray over me and made me a
fisherman! There was the tarpaulin, the baize
shirt, the oil cloth trowsers and seven league
boots, and there my own features, but so reddened
with sun burn and sea breezes, that methought I
had another face, and on other shoulders too. The
sea gulls and the loons, and I, had now all one
trade; we skimmed the crested waves and sought our
prey beneath them, the man with as keen enjoyment
as the birds. Always when the east grew purple, I
launched my dory, my little flat bottomed skiff,
and rowed cross-handed to Point Ledge, the Middle
Ledge, or, perhaps, beyond Egg Rock; often, too,
did I anchor off Dread Ledge, a spot of peril to
ships unpiloted; and sometimes spread an
adventurous sail and tracked across the bay to
South Shore, casting my lines in sight of
Scituate. Ere night fall, I hauled my skiff high
and dry on the beach, laden with red rock cod, or
the white bellied ones of deep water; haddock,
bearing the black marks of Saint Peter's fingers
near the gills; the long bearded hake, whose liver
holds oil enough for a midnight lamp; and now and
then a mighty halibut, with a back broad as my
boat. In the autumn, I soled and caught those
lovely fish, the mackerel. When the wind was
high; when the whale boats, anchored off the
Point, nodded their slender masts at each other,
and the dories pitched and tossed in the surf;
when Nahant Beach was thundering three miles off,
and the spray broke a hundred feet in air, round
the distant base of Egg Rock; when the brimful and
boisterous sea threatened to tumble over the
street of our village; then I made a holiday on
shore.

Many such
a day did I sit snugly in Mr.
Bartlett's store, attentive to the yarns of uncle
Parker; uncle to the whole village, by right of
seniority, but of southern blood, with no kindred
in New England. His figure is before me now,
enthroned upon a mackerel barrel; a lean old man,
of great height, but bent with years, and twisted
into an uncouth shape by seven broken limbs;
furrowed also, and weather worn, as if every gale
for the better part of a century, had caught him
some where on the sea. He looked like a harbinger
of tempest; a shipmate of the Flying Dutchman.
After innumerable voyages aboard men-of-war and
merchantmen, fishing schooners and chebacco boats,
the old salt had become master of a hand cart,
which he daily trundled about the vicinity, and
sometimes blew his fish horn through the streets
of Salem. One of uncle Parker's eyes had been
blown out with gunpowder, and the other did but
glimmer in its socket. Turning it upward as he
spoke, it vvas his delight to tell of cruises
against the French, and battles with his own
shipmates, when he and an antagonist used to be
seated astride of a sailor's chest, each fastened
down by a spike nail through his trowsers, and
there to fight it out. Sometimes he expatiated on
the delicious flavor of the hagden, a greasy and
goose-like fowl, which the sailors catch with hook
and line on the Grand Banks. He dwelt with
rapture on an interminable winter at the Isle of
Sables, where he had gladdened himself, amid polar
snows, with the rum and sugar saved from the wreck
of a West India schooner. And wrathfully did he
shake his fist, as he related how a party of Cape
Cod men had robbed him and his companions of their
lawful spoil, and sailed away with every keg of
old Jamaica, leaving him not a drop to drown his
sorrow. Villains they were, and of that wicked
brotherhood who are said to tie lanterns to
horses' tails, to mislead the mariner along the
dangerous shores of the Cape.

Even now,
I seem to see the group of fishermen,
with that old salt in the midst. One fellow sits
on the counter, a second bestrides an oil barrel,
a third lolls at his length on a parcel of new cod
lines, and another has planted the tarry seat of
his trowsers on a heap of salt, which will shortly
be sprinkled over a lot of fish. They are a
likely set of men. Some have voyaged to the East
Indies or the Pacific, and most of them have
sailed in Marblehead schooners to Newfoundland; a
few have been no farther than the Middle Banks,
and one or two have always fished along the shore;
but as uncle Parker used to say, they have all
been christened in salt water, and know more than
men ever learn in the bushes. A curious figure,
by way of contrast, is a fish dealer from far
up-country, listening with eyes wide open, to
narratives that might startle Sinbad the sailor.
Be it well with you, my brethren! Ye are all
gone, some to your graves ashore, and others to
the depths of ocean; but my faith is strong that
ye are happy; for whenever I behold your forms,
whether in dream or vision, each departed friend
is puffing his long nine, and a mug of the right
black strap goes round from lip to lip!

But where
was the mermaid, in those delightful
times? At a certain window near the centre of the
village, appeared a pretty display of
gingerbread men and horses, picture books and
ballads, small fish-hooks, pins, needles,
sugar-plums and brass thimbles, articles on which
the young fishermen used to expend their money
from pure gallantry. What a picture was Susan
behind the counter! A slender maiden, though the
child of rugged parents, she had the slimmest of
all waists, brown hair curling on her neck, and a
complexion rather pale, except when the sea breeze
flushed it. A few freckles became beauty spots
beneath her eyelids. How was it, Susan, that you
talked and acted so carelessly, yet always for the
best, doing whatever was right in your own eyes,
and never once doing wrong in mine, nor shocked a
taste that had been morbidly sensitive till now?
And whence had you that happiest gift, of
brightening every topic with an unsought gayety,
quiet but irresistible, so that even gloomy
spirits felt your sunshine, and did not shrink
from it? Nature wrought the charm. She made you
a frank, simple, kind hearted, sensible and
mirthful girl. Obeying nature, you did free
things without indelicacy, displayed a maiden's
thoughts to every eye, and proved yourself as
innocent as naked Eve.

It was
beautiful to observe, how her simple and
happy nature mingled itself with mine. She
kindled a domestic fire within my heart, and took
up her dwelling there, even in that chill and
lonesome cavern, hung round with glittering
icicles of fancy. She gave me warmth of feeling,
while the influence of my mind made her
contemplative. I taught her to love the moonlight
hour, when the expanse of the encircled bay was
smooth as a great mirror and slept in a
transparent shadow; while beyond Nahant, the wind
rippled the dim ocean into a dreamy brightness,
which grew faint afar off, without becoming
gloomier. I held her hand and pointed to the long
surf-wave, as it rolled calmly on the beach, in an
unbroken line of silver; we were silent together,
till its deep and peaceful murmur had swept by us.
When the Sabbath sun shone down into the recesses
of the cliffs, I led the mermaid thither, and told
her that those huge, gray, shattered rocks, and
her native sea, that raged for ever like a storm
against them, and her own slender beauty, in so
stern a scene, were all combined into a strain of
poetry. But on the Sabbath eve, when her mother
had gone early to bed, and her gentle sister had
smiled and left us, as we sat alone by the quiet
hearth, with household things around, it was her
turn to make me feel, that here was a deeper
poetry, and that this was the dearest hour of all.
Thus went on our wooing, till I had shot wild fowl
enough to feather our bridal bed, and the Daughter
of the Sca was mine.

I built
a cottage for Susan and myself, and made a
gateway in the form of a Gothic arch, by setting
up a whale's jaw bones. We bought a heifer with
her first calf, and had a little garden on the
hill side, to supply us with potatoes and green
sauce for our fish. Our parlor, small and neat,
was ornamented with our two profiles in one gilt
frame, and with shells and pretty pebbles on the
mantle piece, selected from the sea's treasury of
such things, on Nahant Beach. On the desk,
beneath the looking-glass, lay the Bible, which I
had begun to read aloud at the book of Genesis,
and the singing book that Susan used for her
evening psalm. Except the almanac, we had no
other literature. All that I heard of books, was
when an Indian history, or tale of shipwreck, was
sold by a pedler or wandering subscription man, to
some one in the village, and read through its
owner's nose to a slumbrous auditory. Like my
brother fishermen, I grew into the belief that all
human erudition was collected in our pedagogue,
whose green spectacles and solemn phiz, as he
passed to his little school house, amid a waste of
sand, might have gained him a diploma from any
college in New England. In truth I dreaded him.
When our children were old enough to claim his
care, you remember, Susan, how I frowned, though
you were pleased, at this learned man's encomiums
on their proficiency. I feared to trust them even
with the alphabet; it was the key to a fatal
treasure.

But I
loved to lead them by their little hands
along the beach, and point to nature in the vast
and the minute, the sky, the sea, the green earth,
the pebbles and the shells. Then did I discourse
of the mighty works and co extensive goodness of
the Deity, with the simple wisdom of a man whose
mind had profited by lonely days upon the deep,
and his heart by the strong and pure affections of
his evening home. Sometimes my voice lost itself
in a tremulous depth; for I felt His eye upon me
as I spoke. Once, while my wife and all of us
were gazing at ourselves, in the mirror left by
the tide in a hollow of the sand, I pointed to the
pictured Heaven below, and bade her observe how
religion was strewn every where in our path; since
even a casual pool of water recalled the idea of
that home whither we were travelling, to rest for
ever with our children. Suddenly, your image,
Susan, and all the little faces made up of yours
and mine, seemed to fade away and vanish around
me, leaving a pale visage like my own of former
days, within the frame of a large looking-glass.
Strange illusion!

My life
glided on, the past appearing to mingle
with the present and absorb the future, till the
whole lies before me at a glance. My manhood has
long been waning with a staunch decay; my earlier
contemporaries, after lives of unbroken health,
are all at rest, without having known the
weariness of later age; and now with a wrinkled
forehead and thin white hair as badges of my
dignity, I have become the patriarch, the Uncle
of the village. I love that name; it widens the
circle of my sympathies; it joins all the youthful
to my household, in the kindred of affection.

Like uncle
Parker, whose rheumatic bones were
dashed against Egg Rock, full forty years ago, I
am a spinner of long yarns. Seated on the gunnel
of a dory, or on the sunny side of a boat house,
where the warmth is grateful to my limbs, or by my
own hearth, when a friend or two are there, I
overflow with talk, and yet am never tedious.
With a broken voice I give utterance to much
wisdom. Such, heaven be praised! is the vigor of
my faculties, that many a forgotten usage, and
traditions ancient in my youth, and early
adventures of myself or others, hitherto effaced
by things more recent, acquire new distinctness in
my memory. I remember the happy days when the
haddock were more numerous on all the fishing
grounds than sculpins in the surf; when the deep
water cod swam close in shore, and the dog-fish,
with his poisonous horn, had not learnt to take
the hook. I can number every equinoctial storm,
in which the sea has overwhelmed the street,
flooded the cellars of the village, and hissed
upon our kitchen hearth. I give the history of
the great whale that was landed on Whale Beach,
and whose jaws, being now my gateway, will last
for ages after my coffin shall have passed beneath
them. Thence it is an easy digression to the
halibut, scarcely smaller than the whale, which
ran out six cod lines, and hauled my dory to the
mouth of Boston harbor, before I could touch him
with the gaff.

If melancholy
accidents be the theme of
conversation, I tell how a friend of mine was
taken out of his boat by an enormous shark; and
the sad, true tale of a young man on the eve of
marriage, who had been nine days missing, when his
drowned body floated into the very pathway, on
Marblehead neck, that had often led him to the
dwelling of his bride; as if the dripping corpse
would have come where the mourner was. With such
awful fidelity did that lover return to fulfil his
vows! Another favorite story is of a crazy
maiden, who conversed with angels and had the gift
of prophecy, and whom all the village loved and
pitied, though she went from door to door accusing
us of sin, exhorting to repentance, and
foretelling our destruction by flood or
earthquake. If the young men boast their
knowledge of the ledges and sunken rocks, I speak
of pilots who knew the wind by its scent and the
wave by its taste, and could have steered
blindfold to any port between Boston and Mount
Desert, guided only by the rote of the shore; the
peculiar sound of the surf on each island, beach,
and line of rocks, along the coast. Thus do I
talk, and all my auditors grow wise, while they
deem it pastime.

I recollect
no happier portion of my life, than
this, my calm old age. It is like the sunny and
sheltered slope of a valley, where, late in the
autumn, the grass is greener than in August, and
intermixed with golden dandelions, that had not
been seen till now, since the first warmth of the
year. But with me, the verdure and the flowers
are not frost bitten in the midst of winter. A
playfulness has revisited my mind; a sympathy with
the young and gay; an unpainful interest in the
business of others; a light and wandering
curiosity; arising, perhaps, from the sense that
my toil on earth is ended, and the brief hour till
bedtime may be spent in play. Still, I have
fancied that there is a depth of feeling and
reflection, under this superficial levity,
peculiar to one who has lived long, and is soon to
die.

Show me
any thing that would make an infant smile,
and you shall behold a gleam of mirth over the
hoary ruin of my visage. I can spend a pleasant
hour in the sun, watching the sports of the
village children, on the edge of the surf; now
they chase the retreating wave far down over the
wet sand; now it steals softly up to kiss their
naked feet; now it comes onward with threatening
front, and roars after the laughing crew, as they
scamper beyond its reach. Why should not an old
man be merry too, when the great sea is at play
with those little children? I delight, also, to
follow in the wake of a pleasure party of young
men and girls, strolling along the beach after an
early supper at the Point. Here, with
handkerchiefs at nose, they bend over a heap of
eel grass, entangled in which is a dead skate, so
oddly accoutred with two legs and a long tail,
that they mistake him for a drowned animal. A few
steps further, the ladies scream, and the
gentlemen make ready to protect them against a
young shark of the dog-fish kind, rolling with a
lifelike motion in the tide that has thrown him
up. Next, they are smit with wonder at the black
shells of a wagon load of live lobsters, packed in
rock weed for the country market. And when they
reach the fleet of dories, just hauled ashore
after the day's fishing, how do I laugh in my
sleeve, and sometimes roar outright, at the
simplicity of these young folks and the sly humor
of the fishermen! In winter, when our village is
thrown into a bustle by the arrival of perhaps a
score of country dealers, bargaining for frozen
fish, to be transported hundreds of miles, and
eaten fresh in Vermont or Canada, I am a pleased,
but idle spectator in the throng. For I launch my
boat no more.

When the
shore was solitary, I have found a
pleasure that seemed even to exalt my mind, in
observing the sports or contentions of two gulls,
as they wheeled and hovered about each other,
with hoarse screams, one moment flapping on the
foam of the wave, and then soaring aloft, till
their white bosoms melted into the upper sunshine.
In the calm of the summer sunset, I drag my aged
limbs, with a little ostentation of activity,
because I am so old, up to the rocky brow of the
hill. There I see the white sails of many a
vessel, outward bound or homeward from afar, and
the black trail of a vapor behind the eastern
steamboat; there, too, is the sun, going down, but
not in gloom, and there the illimitable ocean
mingling with the sky, to remind me of Eternity.

But sweetest
of all is the hour of cheerful musing
and pleasant talk, that comes between tile dusk
and the lighted candle, by my glowing fireside.
And never, even on the first Thanksgiving night,
when Susan and I sat alone with our hopes, nor the
second, when a stranger had been sent to gladden
us, and be the visible image of our affection, did
I feel such joy as now. All that belong to me are
here; Death has taken none, nor Disease kept them
away, nor Strife divided them from their parents
or each other; with neither poverty nor riches to
disturb them, nor the misery of desires beyond
their lot, they have kept New England's festival
round the patriarch's board. For I am a
patriarch! Here I sit among my descendants, in my
old arm chair and immemorial corner, while the
firelight throws an appropriate glory round my
venerable frame. Susan! My children! Something
whispers me, that this happiest hour must be the
final one, and that nothing remains but to bless
you all, and depart with a treasure of recollected
joys to Heaven. Will you meet me there? Alas!
your figures grow indistinct, fading into pictures
on the air, and now to fainter outlines, while the
fire is glimmering on the walls of a familiar
room, and shows the book that I flung down, and
the sheet that I deft half written, some fifty
years ago. I lift my eyes to the looking-glass,
and perceive myself alone, unless those be the
mermaid's features, retiring into the depths of
the mirror, with a tender and melancholy smile.

Ah! One
feels a chillness, not bodily, but about
the heart, and, moreover, a foolish dread of
looking behind him, after these pastimes. I can
imagine precisely how a magician would sit down in
gloom and terror, after dismissing the shadows
that had personated dead or distant people, and
stripping his cavern of the unreal splendor which
had changed it to a palace. And now for a moral
to my reverie. Shall it be, that, since fancy can
create so bright a dream of happiness, it were
better to dream on from youth to age, than to
awake and strive doubtfully for something real?
Oh! the slight tissue of a dream can no more
preserve us from the stern reality of misfortune,
than a robe of cobweb could repel the wintry
blast. Be this the moral, then. In chaste and
warm affections, humble wishes, and honest toil
for some useful end, there is health for the mind,
and quiet for the heart, the prospect of a happy
life, and the fairest hope of Heaven.